[!note] Raw reflections from August 2025: The aspiration
Thyself is a voice AI guide to emotional work. Speak out loud to it about any thoughts or feelings that are alive for you, and it will try to help you find clarity around them, using a process inspired by Focusing, Internal Family Systems, and somatic coaching.
You can try it out at thyself.ai.
We use this tagline on our landing page mainly to make it clear that this is a tool that helps people develop their own capacity, not an expert to whom they should give away agency.
But the institution of therapy plays a problematic role in the current situation. There are competing schools of thought about how therapy works. It’s entangled with the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry. Its historical origins are in a specific culture with biases about the goal of healing and what a “normal person” is.
All of this is being reinvented. So I’m interested not in the status quo, but contributing to what succeeds it. The long-term vision is to help raise the baseline level of emotional literacy in the whole culture.
In my ideal world, everyone would have access to healing. When people are hurt—when they’re struggling with anxiety, overwhelm, grief—it would be easy for them to find someone with the wisdom to guide them through that shadowy terrain.
But our work begins with a world in which many do not have this access, and do not even know what is possible in healing.
At this point in my life, I’ve done a lot of healing work—meditation, movement, & plant medicine practices, plus several years of intensive workshop containers. It’s not only changed my life, but taught me that there's a lot we all have in common.
One theme is that our own unconscious patterns perpetuate our suffering. The flip side of that is that a seemingly small shift in perspective, a change in habit, an experiment, can be a trim tab that leads to liberation.
Wherever they came from, these patterns are in us—in our bodies, our sensations, in the stories we tell about them. They turn perception into identity, moment by moment. And the more we are present to that process, the more we can influence it.
A key influence on Thyself is the practice of Focusing, created by the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. He observed that regardless of other factors, some people benefited from therapy and some didn't, and the people who did had a certain skill, which he named Focusing.
The research shows plainly, and repeatedly, that successful patients do indeed improve in this key skill, but the research also shows that they had it to some extent right at the beginning. The others, those who failed, did not have it at all and never achieved it through psychotherapy alone. At that time we did not know how to teach it. —Focusing, p. 5
It's basically an iterative process of staying present to what is uncertain, unverbalized, "the felt sense of all that is", in such a way that one neither gets overwhelmed nor prematurely labels and categorizes it.
"You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that got you into it": Focusing is a method for incrementally changing your thinking, by returning to the freshness of raw perception. It's a method for dialogue between System 1 and System 2, to use Daniel Kahneman's language.
It seems to me that this process is the basic mechanism of all meaningful progress in inner work. In a sense, other modalities, such as Internal Family Systems, merely offer more frames and tools for being with the felt sense and organizing what emerges from it, so that the underlying iterative process can continue.
Focusing also returns agency to the ordinary person:
Since this crucial internal act can be taught, and is not taught by therapy, people need not be therapy patients to learn it. What follows from this fact is a kind of revolution.
No longer need this change process be in the charge of therapists. People can do it for themselves and with each other.
Of course they are not "therapists" or "doctors" or "authorities" with each other, but the authority aspect of the medical doctor never has really fitted the human process of personal change at all. Human problems are by their very nature such that we are each inherently in charge of ourselves. No authority can resolve our problems or tell us how to live. Therefore I and others have been teaching more and more people to help themselves and each other. —p. 6
This is a lifelong practice, in which the pendulum swings from healing individual suffering, to showing up with more vitality, skill, and care in one’s relationships and work with others, and back.
I believe that emotional work is an overlooked aspect of addressing our collective challenges. When we hear about big political and economic shifts in the news, affecting millions or billions of people, it's easy to forget that every single one of the people involved in those shifts has a unique history and inner life.
The connection between inner work and collective dynamics feels important for several reasons:
Root Causes: Many of our largest global challenges (war, climate inaction, polarization) seem to stem not primarily from lack of technical solutions, but from collective emotional patterns - fear, denial, tribalism, unprocessed historical trauma. These patterns get enacted at scale through institutions and politics.
Leverage Points: Traditional approaches to global problems often focus on surface-level policy changes or technological fixes. But if these problems are manifestations of collective emotional patterns, then widespread improvement in emotional literacy and healing capacity could be a powerful leverage point for systemic change.
Breaking Cycles: There's a compelling theory that traumatized people who haven't processed their trauma tend to unconsciously recreate traumatic situations - and this happens at both individual and collective levels. Countries and cultures can carry unprocessed historical trauma that influences their current behavior. Tools that help people process trauma could help break these cycles.
Agency and Scale: It's easy to feel powerless in the face of global challenges. But emotional work offers a way to "think globally, act locally" that starts with what's directly in our control - our own patterns and responses. As more people develop capacity for emotional regulation and awareness, it could shift the collective field.
Alternative to Acting Out: When people don't have tools to process difficult emotions, they often externalize them through conflict, addiction, or other harmful behaviors. This happens at societal scale too - collective shadow material gets projected onto enemies, fueling conflict. Tools for emotional work offer an alternative path.